Seven years into running a services business, we’ve recently
recognized a pattern across several of the projects we’ve done. The
pattern is that the customer wants to outsource the initial development of a product but also wants to bring subsequent maintenance engineering and feature enhancement in-house.

This pattern doesn’t apply to all customers or all projects, but
I’ve now seen it repeated by three customers in three pretty different
industries. Not being the sharpest knife in the drawer, it’s taken me
that much iteration to see the logic behind it.

I think there are four reasons this strategy can make a lot of sense, which I detail in the full blog entry.